The Vampire of Ropraz by Jacques Chessex

Author:Jacques Chessex
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bitter Lemon Press
Published: 2011-12-04T16:00:00+00:00

9

So Favez is locked up in Oron prison. He is not held for long: only fifty-seven days. How is it possible for the most notorious criminal in all Switzerland to escape punishment in this way?

In Oron, contrary to every expectation, Charles-Augustin Favez will benefit from the interventions of two individuals. The first is inevitable: it is by a psychiatrist already famous at the time. Dr Albert Mahaim, a student of the theories of Charcot, who had attended his lectures at the Salpêtrière Hospital in Paris, has himself carried out a considerable amount of research on hysteria, sadism and neurasthenia, and senses in Favez an excellent subject for observation, and possibly for corroboration, useful to the development of his own theories. A professor in the Lausanne Medical Faculty, Albert Mahaim is also one of the founders of the Cery psychiatric institution, to the west of the town, on the wooded fringe of the community of Prilly-Chasseur. The ambition of the Cery institution is to grow into one of the most important European centres for the study of mental illness. For instance, shortly after it opened in 1873, thirty years before the events related here, the institution established several geriatric wings and a model farm, where the less dangerous patients, or those who, in the terminology of the time, were in a “latent” phase, were allowed to work, to the extent that they demonstrated their ability to do so. There were orchards, a market garden, forestry, poultry, tillage and livestock too – the Cery herd, with several prize-winning bulls each year at the canton’s agricultural fairs, was soon considered one of the best cared for in the region. Already in 1903, the farm employed forty or so residential patients under the supervision of several doctors and overseers.

Albert Mahaim examines Favez and finds him to be an alcoholic, taciturn, inclined by his atavism to fits of anger that are liable to escalate into violence. But perhaps Favez is not the monster that people think. In any case, not a dismemberer of corpses or a cannibal.

His physical examination of Favez finds that he has a very robust physique and an uncommon tolerance of hardship. A tree that fell in the forest, during an unfortunate time of his life when the subject was working under a master woodcutter, has injured one of his shoulders seriously enough to leave him with a slight dislocation between bone and collarbone. But it causes Favez no pain, his upper body is powerful, his arms long and very muscular, his penis and testicles very well developed. A notable detail: as a consequence of frequent masturbation from an early age, the foreskin has been pulled back from the glans; the solitary practices of the subject have circumcised him naturally.

“Has the subject had sexual relations with a woman?”

“Despite his reticence and after many hours of talking, the subject admitted that he has never been with a woman. He has had encounters with prostitutes in Lausanne and Yverdon, but had had too much to drink and the women did not insist.

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